David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man

This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends with his breakthrough novel, Changing Places, in the rather better year, 1975.

A master-practitioner of narrative, Lodge chooses to write with an artful flatness which recalls Frank Kermode’s similarly self-depreciative memoir, Not Entitled. Lodge’s career was, formatively, in the same provincial, first-generation university orbit. Unlike Kermode (for whom it proved a dubious experience) Lodge never let himself be headhunted into Oxbridge. He turned down the inevitable mid-career offer because, principally, he believed it would be bad for his fiction. And he didn’t think he belonged at high tables.

Lodge first saw the world in working-class East Dulwich. I was born a couple of miles away, in Brixton, a couple of years later. Mine was a not quite so good a year, with the war looming. Both of us were only children of upper working-class parents who wanted more for their offspring.